It was my part to accompany our guests ashore: when I
kissed the little girl good-bye at the pier steps, Vaekehu gave a
cry of gratification, reached down her hand into the boat, took
mine, and pressed it with that flattering softness which seems the
coquetry of the old lady in every quarter of the earth. The next
moment she had taken Stanislao's arm, and they moved off along the
pier in the moonlight, leaving me bewildered. This was a queen of
cannibals; she was tattooed from hand to foot, and perhaps the
greatest masterpiece of that art now extant, so that a while ago,
before she was grown prim, her leg was one of the sights of Tai-o-
hae; she had been passed from chief to chief; she had been fought
for and taken in war; perhaps, being so great a lady, she had sat
on the high place, and throned it there, alone of her sex, while
the drums were going twenty strong and the priests carried up the
blood-stained baskets of long-pig. And now behold her, out of that
past of violence and sickening feasts, step forth, in her age, a
quiet, smooth, elaborate old lady, such as you might find at home
(mittened also, but not often so well-mannered) in a score of
country houses. Only Vaekehu's mittens were of dye, not of silk;
and they had been paid for, not in money, but the cooked flesh of
men. It came in my mind with a clap, what she could think of it
herself, and whether at heart, perhaps, she might not regret and
aspire after the barbarous and stirring past. But when I asked
Stanislao--'Ah!' said he, 'she is content; she is religious, she
passes all her days with the sisters.'

Stanislao (Stanislaos, with the final consonant evaded after the
Polynesian habit) was sent by Bishop Dordillon to South America,
and there educated by the fathers. His French is fluent, his talk
sensible and spirited, and in his capacity of ganger-in-chief, he
is of excellent service to the French. With the prestige of his
name and family, and with the stick when needful, he keeps the
natives working and the roads passable. Without Stanislao and the
convicts, I am in doubt what would become of the present regimen in
Nuka-hiva; whether the highways might not be suffered to close up,
the pier to wash away, and the Residency to fall piecemeal about
the ears of impotent officials. And yet though the hereditary
favourer, and one of the chief props of French authority, he has
always an eye upon the past. He showed me where the old public
place had stood, still to be traced by random piles of stone; told
me how great and fine it was, and surrounded on all sides by
populous houses, whence, at the beating of the drums, the folk
crowded to make holiday. The drum-beat of the Polynesian has a
strange and gloomy stimulation for the nerves of all. White
persons feel it--at these precipitate sounds their hearts beat
faster; and, according to old residents, its effect on the natives
was extreme. Bishop Dordillon might entreat; Temoana himself
command and threaten; at the note of the drum wild instincts
triumphed. And now it might beat upon these ruins, and who should
assemble? The houses are down, the people dead, their lineage
extinct; and the sweepings and fugitives of distant bays and
islands encamp upon their graves. The decline of the dance
Stanislao especially laments. 'Chaque pays a ses coutumes,' said
he; but in the report of any gendarme, perhaps corruptly eager to
increase the number of delits and the instruments of his own power,
custom after custom is placed on the expurgatorial index. 'Tenez,
une danse qui n'est pas permise,' said Stanislao: 'je ne sais pas
pourquoi, elle est tres jolie, elle va comme ca,' and sticking his
umbrella upright in the road, he sketched the steps and gestures.
All his criticisms of the present, all his regrets for the past,
struck me as temperate and sensible. The short term of office of
the Resident he thought the chief defect of the administration;
that officer having scarce begun to be efficient ere he was
recalled. I thought I gathered, too, that he regarded with some
fear the coming change from a naval to a civil governor.